1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to exchange apparatuses, and more particularly, to an expandable exchange apparatus and a backup system thereof, which is applicable to a network architecture.
2. Description of Related Art
Along with the advanced network technology and the fact that the electronic data processing device gets popular, network has become an essential part of our daily life for sending and receiving information. Everywhere in the world including the government bureaus, enterprises, schools and even households, in the pursuing of higher information transmission efficiency, it is getting popular for the users to take the use of network to deliver information.
In order to provide more terminal device users to efficiently share network bandwidth, a switch hub (or in short, switch), which is an improved traditional Hub, was made out. Switch and hub hold the same task in the network business, the major different between them is that each port of a switch has its own specific bandwidth and is individually capable of data exchange, however, all the ports of a hub share the same bandwidth, therefore, the switch has greater data transmission amount than the hub in the network transmission within the same time period.
Specifically, switch is applied to connect the physical sections of network in order to interconnect the data of the sections. The switch operates on a layer 2 of an open system interconnection (OSI) model, and according to the address of the layer 2 to direct traffic, for example, the Ethernet media access control (MAC) address. Some other switches also provide other functions, for example, virtual area network and the layer 3 switch function, etc. The switch can automatically setup and detect the traffic flow of each connection port of Ethernet, and obtain the information of the connection situation of the terminal devices that connect to the connection port. Next, the switch directly transmits traffic to the target connection port. The switch flow is following the processing speed of the hardware, effectively without delay.
The connection ports of the switch from the prior art, which connect to the terminal devices, are all based on manufacture specification number. For example, manufacturer fabricates switch with twelve connection ports, one of the twelve connection ports must be used to connect with network (e.g. Ethernet) in order to provide the terminal devices that are connecting to the switch with the capability of connecting with other far end terminal devices via the network, and the remaining eleven connection ports can provide only eleven terminal devices, e.g. servers, for connection. In fact, for the purpose of minimizing size, current server is mostly assembled inside a single machine box in blade server mode, and currently, a single machine box can hold twelve blade servers. Therefore, if a single server machine box with twelve blade servers corresponds to a switch with twelve connection ports, one of the blade server can not connect to the network since one of the connection ports is used to connect with the network, unless add in a second switch. However, there is only one connection port needed for the one remaining blade server and another one connection port for connecting to the network, there will be ten connection port wasted after adding in a second switch.
Hence, it is a highly urgent issue in the industry for how to provide an expandable switch or exchange apparatus.